We Have Dreamed Too Little
by Systemic Anomaly
Summary: ...when our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little. Pain is a barrier – it keeps love out. But when it comes down to a matter of survival for Greg House when he crosses accidental paths with death, is it enough?


**Title:** We Have Dreamed Too Little

**Author:** Well, duh.

**Word Count:** 3,000, baby.

**Pairing:** Ehhh, this one contains a little bit of House/Cuddy, quite by accident. Mentions of House/Chase – one sentence! – and House/Stacy. All-around, 100 pure _joy._

**Rating:** T/M

**Warnings:** Ho boy. Wellll... darkfic, big-time. Angst? Non-canon character death. Mention of IV drug use. Also, if quotes make you itch, you might want to pop out for some Benadryl. Few and far-between, though.

There may be a shorter sequel to this, coming very soon. Some people have suggested that it might be a good thing. We shall see.

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The hydrotherapy pool is deserted at this hour, the room dark and shadowed in a way that always makes him think of morgues and empty rooms, that silent breathing second of aftermath, between _there_ and existing only in a memory of rumpled sheets and the faint scent of death. It's a morbid thought, but Greg House has kept such close company with morbid thoughts over the last ten years or so that it barely registers on the scale. This is supposed to be his _own _ dark silent time, his single concession, the place that has almost accidentally replaced the chapel or Coma Guy's too-cheery room as his own portable little black hole, away from prying eyes and demanding mouths.

No one ever thought to look for him here. Not Chase, whose eyes had held increasing mutiny these last weeks, a thinly-veiled glaze of resentment that even House, with his gunsight eye, couldn't completely decipher. Not Foreman, or Cameron, who, if she did find him here, would fight in her gallant way to cover her pity with arrogance, to sublimate her feelings with practicality. _I'm better_ was nothing more than a sloppy but effective and thickly-layered paint job over the scratches on the walls of _I'm needy. _ And not even Cuddy, whose backhanded idea this "therapy" had been, in disgusted frustration with his increasing pain and his refusal to deal with the consequences.

Not that she had ever expected him to take her seriously.

_"Who you are matters. Find someone you trust."  
"Someone like you?"  
"Someone you like."_

The idea had been, to work the leg in an environment that wasn't as stressful as weight-bearing. Simple, really, when you thought about it... until it was after dark, and you were alone with the dragging scuff of said useless leg on cold tiles, and the shadows, and your own fucked-up mind. To House, the idea at first had been pure congealed loathing.

_"What? Go down and play Flipper so that all the kids with bone cancer and deformed little arms can compare notes on my leg? Pass."_

But here he was, and he was alone, and after a while the lead-weighted quiet began to feel almost like home. Like prayer, to a God he didn't believe in.

_Teach me to serve you as I should, to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and ask not for reward._

If you wait long enough for a miracle, you start to think that Santa maybe skipped your house this year. Bitter pun of your choice definitely intended.

_...his leg propped up, his rational mind dialed down even as he fills a syringe from a glass vial. He probably doesn't even need the tourniquet, anymore; but it is easier to tie it off, the small sharp pain of constricted flesh, than to think. Easier to rub out a vein, to pause and suck in the sharp breath of anticipation. Easier to tap out the tiny bubbles in the barrel, to eye the needle like it held the answer to life and loneliness, the answer to the puzzle. To angle it into the vein and close his eyes at the smaller sharpness. _

_To draw the plunger back, and he _is _very good -- regardless of what sore and pissed-off patients that had pissed _him_ off might rave about -- and watch as a small flower of dark red blooms in the clear liquid. And so much easier just to depress the plunger, filling his veins with morphine, to withdraw the needle a pair of heartbeats before it hits his chest and thighs first, a long slow constriction of warmth, like orgasm, every nerve ending reacting and crying out in pleasure and relief. He arches his head back, letting it drop onto the back of the sofa, all the taut tense lines of his body relaxing, the pain in his leg fading back, and down, until the warm-full-heavy floating calm euphoria overrides it entirely._

_So much easier than thinking, when you came right down to it._

It is too _easy_ to think, here, in this hollow therapeutic tomb, too easy to replay voices and expressions and notice the absence of warmth that leeches compassion from tired bones, leaving only weary resignation; and it's this kind of weight that would usually make House scowl at the empty room and instead turn and crutch away from the pool, from the hospital, from too many histories and too much guilt.

Not all of it is his.

_"You're going to kill yourself." The voice at his back is one he's heard a thousand times before, and any other time he might have turned, tossed his head with a smirk and said nothing. The fact that she's naked except for his rumpled black shirt, the sleeves hiked up and the collar in disarray, tempers nothing about her tone. _"Greg."

_He gathers himself without saying a word, pulling his bad leg underneath him and standing awkwardly, the cane clashing with his own lack of clothing - except for an equally rumpled pair of boxers - in a way that was laughably, bitterly ludicrous. _

_The silence built of pain; and he might have mapped it out, diagrammed it with the squeak of whiteboard markers, so well does he know its contours already. He can hear her shake her head; after all, he's easy to give up on. Years of empty echoes, have taught him that._

_He'd thought she might have tried a little harder._

_After all, she owes him._

_"Damn it, House!" And it's "House" again, "Greg" tossed away like a broken child's toy. He might have laughed... until Cuddy is suddenly on her feet, all flashing eyes and tousled dark hair, and her hand is rough on his bare shoulder. "What is it with you? You're too old to be trying to be one of the cool kids. Okay, sure, your leg hurts! Deal! We all deal with you, cut us a little damn slack, here. I'm doing the best I can."_

_He hates himself already, and so when he opens his mouth and what comes out is, "Yeah. I've seen your best. I'm still living with it," he can't hate himself any more. It's a good deal, really._

_And she isn't Stacy, he has no reason to simply stand there, the shaded lamplight so brutal now, like an old forgotten photograph. No reason to turn and fix her with that naked and arresting icy gaze, at once screaming volumes and closing down completely. _

_"I can't stay and watch this," she whispers, and he wants to tell her that he already knows. _

_No reason to remember better times, sitting with Stacy at the movies, hissing in whispers about the guy down front's disco hairdo, tossing single kernels of popcorn at the back of the guy's head and then freezing his face into innocence, over and over, until Stacy is helpless with muffled laughter and smacks his arm loud enough to turn heads in the rows in front. Times when he was sleek and naked, and could wind the leg over her hips without pain, when he breathed in the darkness that was her, when the world had still left a few doors open to him. _

_When he could still stand alone in the shower on both of his own feet._

_Before he'd known that Robert Chase had a soft downy golden fuzz at the small of his back, that he had a faded red scar across the back of his left knee, and that it didn't matter whose hands were on him in the sweltering smog-soaked night; it always ended like this._

_Would that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain._

_Gregory House was simply inaccessible; they came, yes, to him, but he was hollow. Spend enough years building up that barbed-wire heart, and even the people you want to touch you can't get close enough without bleeding. And eventually, they get tired of mending their scars. The looks were always the same; the ones that said _I should have expected this from you. _They expected House to be House... until they didn't, anymore. Until they realized that some walls weren't just walls; they were foundation. Driven deep. That some love couldn't fix the ruins, couldn't make the pieces fit._

_He'd just assumed Lisa Cuddy had known that._

_She's crying; and that in and of itself is nearly surreal. He isn't looking at her, anymore, but he can't not hear her backing off from him, can't not hear her picking her skirt and blouse from his floor, dropping his shirt as if it no longer mattered to her... which, he guessed, it didn't. _

_You know me. You don't mind waiting. You just can't show me, but God, I'm praying, that you'll find me, and that you'll see me. That you run, and never tire. _

_She didn't slam the door. He hadn't expected her to._

It's dark in the hydro room, full dark by now, and as House makes his slow scowling way across the tiles, he might have sensed that something was wrong. Might have, if his pinpoint observations were running full-throttle, if his mind had been as sharp as it should have been. If he hadn't just dosed himself again, chasing the morphine with Vicodin, if he hadn't been thinking only of dropping his knapsack on one of the rough-hewn wooden benches that ringed the pool and digging out his shorts, carefully cut long to hide - even from non-existent prying eyes - the blasted ruin that used to be his right thigh.

If he'd been thinking of living.

Loving.

Surviving.

But when his hand finds the switch, swapping the cane to his left and shifting his balance in that second-natured way that he doesn't even have to process, the shadow in the room's back corner jumps into sharp relief, and it isn't a shadow.

_Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little._

The man's face, drawn and pale and sheened with greasy sicksweat, isn't where House's eyes are drawn first, every muscle in his back pulling taut like a panther's, the hand that grips the cane clenching hard enough to hurt.

House's eyes are drawn to the _gun._

For a moment that seems carved in sheets of ice, neither of them moves: the man(_too young,_ House's mind feeds him mercilessly, _Just a kid, really, and his pupils are huge, and he looks like a scared, trapped, rat_), caught resplendent in the staging of his own death, staring from across the pool at Greg House, this uninvited visitor in his scene; House, for his part, feeling the slow dredge of morphine leave his veins in pure adrenal pulsesweat. There is no question, no question at all what this is, what it was meant to be, and House has a moment to wonder why the kid had picked the hydro room at all(and then laugh brutally at himself: why had _he _ picked it, after all? Because no one would ever have found him here. For different reasons, of course, but that doesn't really matter now)... before the insectile black muzzle has left its nest in the kid's brown hair and zeroed in directly on the right lapel of House's sport coat.

_Jesus, he can't even _aim, House thinks with bleak amusement. _But okay, he's upset. I'll let that one slide._

"Don't come any closer!" the kid shrills at him, and the echoes are nearly deafening. But the only thing that echoes _back _ is the crushing hush of the room, and the soft lapping of chlorinated water. "I--- I _know_ you! How'd you get in here?"

"I have a key," House returns smoothly, slipping the knapsack off his shoulder in one long, articulated motion - _See where my hands are?_ - and swapping the cane back to his right hand. Nodding to the kid, put him off-guard. "Comes with the job. I still have to pay for my jockstrap, though." A pause. "How'd _you?"_

The gun, greasy steel, changing hands, but the muzzle never wavers. "I know a guy." His voice is reedy, hysterical. "I'll take you with me!" he shrieks, still at full volume as if he'd never stopped. "Man, it was your bad luck to come in here tonight."

_Yeah, no shit, _ House answers him silently, but his feet are still moving, step by careful dragging step, traitorous feet edging across wet blue tiles, cane skidding in the puddles between them. Foot by foot, closing the gap. Eyes on the gun, the empty room, the kid's face. "What's your name, kid?"

"Dan," without thinking, and the kid's face all at once closes, like biting down, like someone who's been tricked into eating something rotten. The gun rises even further, and now House is looking at six inches of black steel _real_ close-up.

_May all our defilements be dispelled completely._

"Dan, cool," House murmurs, still moving, oh-so-excruciatingly _slow._ When the kid flings his other hand to the grip of his pistol, clutching it in a two-handed deathgrip, House merely waves it off: _Just two guys hangin' out, _ his cocked brow seems to say. _Relax. Take a load off._ "If you hadn't noticed, Dan," dryly, "I've got a bit of a bum leg. Shooting a cripple isn't going to win you any points with the Man Upstairs."

House _knows – _without knowing_ – _that the kid has come here to take his own life, he's seen it before in a million faces, a million desperate waif-eyes above a million blue-green gowns, a million stiff pale hands still clutching empty pill bottles. He'd seen it before in the mirror. It smelled like the end of the world, _this_ kid's world, anyway, and when someone has made up their mind to die a thousand infusions of morphine or doxycycline aren't going to make a fucking bit of difference, except that this time he, _Greg House,_ was the only one _here,_ the ghosts of a thousand guilt-sodden nights his silent companion, and if solving the puzzle was the reason he was still alive then this was the _ultimate_ puzzle, the unguessable code sequence, the genetic time-bomb that lurked, hungry, in wait, and he'd solved every puzzle, and who cared if he drove people away, if he drugged himself to sleep with bitterness and Vicodin, because this kid was too young, too _young_ and _stupid_ to know that spraying his brains across the wall wouldn't _help, _ that Nietzsche was right, the abyss sure as _fuck_ looked into you, and found you wanting...

...and Greg House has only thrown his cane across the room with a bone-breaking clatter three times since he'd worked at Princeton-Plainsboro, three times he'd forgotten that he was crippled, forgotten that he'd never be whole again, forgotten the look on Cuddy's face when he'd woken from the coma and _raged,_ raged at her and Stacy and the whole goddamn _world,_ and that just maybe she'd only let him in because she thought she owed him that, and this would make the fourth, no time to take even another single step, cane as distracting _rattle-snap _ in the dark and he'd body-slammed the kid before he knew he meant to, and as they wrestle for the gun House feels his bad leg slip in the wet and prays - really prays - for five more seconds, for a better grip, for a second chance, and when the gun goes off the first time like the cracking of the Apocalyptic seals everything washes red before his eyes -

_it's dark, now, and in the rain-soaked streets they rest like a cliché. Wilson's dark hair plastered to his head, sprawled on the curb like a child with a skinned knee that doesn't want to cry. Cuddy _is_ crying, the Big Bad Boss with a hand knotted in her long coat and the other at her face, Chase and Cameron standing inches apart but separated by a chasm that nothing will ever cross again. He can see the words on her mouth, he knows somehow that she will blame herself again for this, believe that he wanted it to end this way: who better than Gregory House, M.D., to go out in a final blaze of glory? _

_Foreman in the back, arms crossed in wet gray wool, and Stacy with her arm around Lisa Cuddy, and they all look as if they've been caught out at murder. His bike stands solitary in their midst, like a memorial to a fallen soldier, and he wants to scream at them, rage and laugh at their melodrama - can't they see that he wasn't, had never been, worth any of this? He'd tried, but in the end, he'd dreamed too little_

- and an arm catches him across the chest, wind leaving his lungs in one rib-cracking impact, and House has a moment to realize in dull wonder that he _hasn't_ been shot, that the hydro room reeks of bitter cordite and a huge gaping chunk has been blasted from one wall, before his red Chuck Taylor loses its dubious grip on the tiles and he is falling, an endless wrenching plunge and when his body hits the chilly water everything in him just seems to simply seize up and stop.

House fights it, fights the frigid pull of soaked and heavy sport coat, denim that seems to have gained forty pounds; but in a moment of unreasonable panic he realizes that he just might not have enough strength in his leg to pull it off. He can drown here, flailing not two feet away from his iPod and his Vicodin, a floor beneath Cuddy's office while she sits there shuffling paperwork and closing up her desk. And even as he swallows chlorine-drenched water and kicks frantically with his legs, hard enough to feel something pull and give way in the back of his knee, he knows that once again, he's too late. _There's something in you that's broken, now,_ Stacy had told him, tearful and angry as she threw books into a cardboard box, as he stood pinned to the spot by her fury. _You're _there,_ Greg, but I can't _reach_ you anymore._

And as he fights, spitting water and saving the breath he wants so badly to curse with, he thinks he knows now what she meant; maybe what Cuddy had meant, as well. And, surprise, surprise, there's a little fight left in him after all. If only he has a chance to tell them.

But when the gun explodes a final time, the echo sounds like failure. _Why fight, if you're going to fail, _ and for the kid at the edge of the pool there'd be no redeeming hand in the dark.

"You don't know what you're pushing away, Greg," she'd said.

_To the divine silence of unreachable endlessness; to the divine silence of perfected knowledge. To the divine silence of the soundless voice._

And a breath of seconds, and a small flower of dark red blooms in the clear liquid, spreading over the water like a balm.

Like a desert lily, like the mainline.

And Greg House knows that it might as well have been his.

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Dedicated to three very special people. You know who you are.

Reviews make me happy.


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